The rapid escalation of drug-resistant bacterial infections and decreased investment in antibiotic research make it imperative to develop alternative therapies. Engineering synthetic bacteriophages (or phages) with expanded host ranges is one approach which has, to this point, remained underdeveloped. Previous attempts to engineer phage host range utilized genome reconstruction in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Ando et al. Cell Syst. 1, 187-196 (2015)). This method is limited in that it requires prior knowledge of the host range of the phages used for reconstruction. Alternatively, some studies have relied on traditional phage mutant selection procedures which utilizes natural evolution (Perry et al. PLoS One 10, e0130639 (2015); Qimron et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 19039-44(2006)). This process proceeds through single mutations at a time, and some of these mutation may be deleterious initially though required towards the evolutionary goal set. In this way, natural evolution procedures often result in bottlenecks where too many concomitant mutations are necessary to both obtain the selected phenotype and have a viable organism. Additional approaches that overcome these limitations will prove much more powerful.